We use cycle lanes and paths a lot for the disability scooter. Some of them are very bad, but the worst are the footpaths at the side of main roads, which are often completely impassible because of grass, brambles, hawthorn, etc. This is disgraceful because it forces pedestrians to walk in the road.
Bill
So they cocked it up. Not the fault of cyclists if the council is clueless.
Tim
Looked to me to be working remarkably well. No idea how it's working now admittedly but I think it would be hasty and wrong to dismiss shared space.
Tim
Busy controlled junction on the way into St. Albans. Room for two cars allowing one lane to turn right. Cycle refuge and lane now painted on road limiting vehicles to a single lane. I avoid it between 8.30am and
9.30am as it also has pedestrian control for the nearby secondary school.I'll bet the 1/2 mile traffic queue wish they had widened the road slightly!
Is it painted on in dotted lines or continuous lines?
I believe it is an essentially flawed concept. There was an attempt at something similar on a road I know. Initially many motorists avoided it because it looked like a pedestrian precinct. After a couple of years, when they had realised it wasn't, the Council had to put in bollards to separate vehicles and pedestrians again.
The problem is that traffic management is such a complex system that you don't really know what has caused a particular effect. Much though I hate to agree with Rod, I consider it entirely likely that those road users who have the choice, are probably avoiding Poynton, thus reducing traffic flow.
I'll have to check. Dotted I think. Either way, vehicles avoid it.
This opinion
written in 2014 (after the scheme had been going a while) is not as rosy as the publicity film produced by the proponents and linked to above. (although even this review does admit its got good as well as bad points)
Thanks for that. Not seen anything other than the promo video so it is interesting to see a more balanced view.
Tim
Presumably there are more modern modelling packages available. Would you have any in mind?
There is a ped crossing on each arm.
Very few road junctions are designed by professional road planners nowadays. If you go back 40 years, most councils would have such people on their staff. That work is all contracted out now, and the contractors don't normally have those skills, and only in very large road schemes are they likely to bring in an expert in this area. Otherwise, at best you get rule of thumb.
It's sickening to see glaringly obvious mistakes in junction design, wasting many hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers money.
BTW, I used to do similar calculations for queuing in networking routers. The maths is the same queueing theory for road junctions, which is not a particularly easy branch of maths to understand! Back then (30 years ago), we did it by hand using probability maths. There was some software specific to telephone exchange calculations, which is where this branch of maths originated. The landscape is probably completely different today.
First real attempts at understanding Queuing Theory were by Bell Telephone Labs in 20s/30s. They needed to know how many telephone operators were needed Network Routers have added complexity, as 'retries' following packet collisions are automatic leading to exponentiation growth in packets, hence issues when you reach 60% of theoretical capacity (Token Ring had no such issues) When, for a short time in early 90's, I was a computing technician at a Sixth Form College, I had to explain these issues to the "Head of Computing" who had no understand of the concepts. He must have been paid
5 times my pay! (I was changing routers to switches)
I'm a bit rusty, although I do know that those tools are still used, but I don't think they work when there are significant nos of cycles You could email me jc:two:three:five:at:cam:ac:uk
I think it demonstrates a fact observed well over half a century ago when traffic lights were still a novelty substitute for a police controlled traffic junction where the flow actually improved whenever the traffic officer on 'Point Duty' was absent for one reason or another.
The big problem with 'Robot Traffic Police", which is simply what a set of traffic lights is, is the imposition of control singularly lacking any adaptive intelligence to micro-manage the actual needs of the road and pedestrian users of such junctions.
Given ample hints in the approach road layouts, motorists will be far more inclined to actually make productive use of their traffic awareness skills than to regard the "Traffic Lights" as simply an adversary to try and get the better of and take a more commonsense attitude in their interactions with the traffic around them (both pedestrian and vehicular) as per the underlying imperative of "The Highway Code".
Traffic lights should be considered as the second option in the control of junctions only as a last resort, not a first resort. Preference should be given to designing a junction so as to give back autonomy to the road users who, with proper training and the required awareness of their responsibilites, can do a far better job of such micro-management.
Provided the driving test involves an accepted minimum of social interaction skills and is able to weed out the psycopaths[1] currently responsible for RTCs (_not_ RTAs, there's really no such thing as an accident other than for the very rare event of catastrophic mechanical failure[2] or a sudden and serious medical emergency[3]), such junction layouts will offer a much better and safer flow of traffic than we currently see at traffic light controlled junctions.
[1] Motorists who rudely try to push their way through the traffic, usually thinking the nearside lane offers a quick getaway option from a set of lights with a 2 lane approach, only to discover why the locals don't use the nearside lane on account of parked up vehicles a hundred yards or so further up the road and don't have the wit to use their indicators in ample time to prevail upon the kindness of said locals (presumably thinking it'll be a waste of effort because they assume other road users will be just as inconsiderate as themselves).Dismayingly, taxi drivers seem to make up an alarmingly high proportion of psychopathic drivers. There's obviously some room for educational improvement here. You'd think the traffic police would be more on the case but I've seen plenty of bad examples of police driving so maybe it's a case of a 'Driver Brotherhood' mentality protecting such 'professional' drivers from prosecutuion.
[2] The MoT roadworthiness requirements should (and does) make such causes extremely rare. However, the increasing numbers of HGVs from foreign lands on our roads does bring such legislated protection into question. [3] We're only human and it's impossible to predict who is likely to be at risk from a potentially fatal congenital weakness such as a sudden stroke or heart attack, even when thorough medical screening is considered as a means of eliminating such risks.The risk in apparently healthy individuals, thankfully, is so low that the benefit of medical screening is so slight compared to its costs that thus far it has never been considered as a legal requisite other than for the more beneficial, post 75 year old group and for those whose medical history has already revealed such risks.
Pedestrain controlled crossings are where you see most occurrences of running a red light, normally when there is not a pedestrian in sight for several hundreds of yards around to even account for the red light in the first place.
Over the years, it's become apparent to me that whoever is responsible for the timing sequence employed should be put up against my fantasy wall of firing squad. Instead of expiring the delay to give the pedestrian a green light against the road traffic green timer, it seems the required delay for traffic is initiated by the pedestrian request for the green man, forcing them to wait out the 2 or 3 minutes road traffic flow allowance.
Naturally, any sane pedestrian will cross as soon as the road traffic clears rather than dumbly wait for the green man. By the time the green light appears for the pedestrian, he's long gone and road traffic is stopped, needlessly by the lights.
If the designer had configured a proper timing sequence, he'd have allowed the green man signal to appear immediately the button had been pressed if the previous 2 or 3 minutes of green for the road traffic had already been exceeded. That way, the pedestrian will get to avail themself of the light and the stopped traffic will not feel so put upon in seeing that at the very least _someone_ did actually gain a benefit. Any following pedestrians too late to join the crossing party will at least be able to understand why they have to wait for the next change to a green man signal and be a little less inclined to cross, not the least in part due to stalled traffic clearing that section of road.
This counterproductive timing sequence is so blatant that I rarely press the button on such pedestrian controlled crossings when I need to cross a road, preferring to wait for a suitable gap to appear naturally since finally getting the green man signal tends to coincide with the arrival of traffic just after such a natural gap.
Actually using such lights more often than not results in inconvenience for both pedestrian and road traffic alike and I don't want to participate in such traffic disruption engendered by the idiot/malicious designer.
This used to happen all the time by me, I asked the council to re-time the crossing so the pedestrians went green within a few seconds and everyone was happier then. You didn't need to do emergency stops just because the pedestrians were fed up waiting. When the lights did go red you actually had a pedestrian cross.
I always ignore the pedestrian lights, but make a point of pressing the button as I cross, to bugger up the traffic!
Cycle lanes? Be off with you!
I had a look:-)
Chain dotted.
Yes, you're obviously _part_ of the problem but, I suspect from the ill concieved timing algorithm seemingly in universal use, only a _small_ part of the problem, :-)
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.